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I was out walking with my son recently, and I pointed out where a row of iron stumps could be seen, protruding from the limestone capping on a low wall outside a civic building. As anyone who grew up in the UK knows, our built environment bears these scars from the early 1940s, when Britain found itself under siege and struggling to re-arm against the Nazis. Park railings and the gates of historic buildings were cut down and hauled away as part of the war effort.

Then and now: removal of railings from public spaces

Giving up their railings proved to have a positive effect on the morale of the nation: it offered visible proof that something was being done, and virtually everyone was happy to join in. Vast quantities of iron were collected – but the evidence for it being used is somewhat scantier. Chemically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with reclaimed cast iron: it can be melted down and made into things like bomb casings… but the historical record that includes photographs and newsreel footage of people cheerfully giving up their railings isn’t matched by anything showing said railings arriving at the foundries in places such as Port Talbot or Sheffield.

Even Buckingham Palace joined in the recycling effort…

So where did the iron go? It’s hard to be certain: a few people have suggested that the government was caught out by the sheer quantity of material collected. They couldn’t use it all, but they appreciated the morale-boosting effect of the project and allowed it to continue. Were our park railings quietly dumped at sea? Some think so. As I researched this article, each anecdote that I followed up seemed only to reference another, with no hard evidence resulting: let’s just say that the dumping hypothesis is widely believed, among those who have expressed an interest. (The aluminium pots and pans that were also collected at this time do appear to have been made into Spitfires, however.)

Did the railing recycling scheme fail because supply exceeded demand? Perhaps so, but I didn’t want to complicate the issue for my six year-old. We just looked at the row of stumps sticking up out of the wall, and imagined the railings made into tanks and bombs – just as Lord Beaverbrook, Minister for Supply, must have intended.

There is another, still more complicated twist that I won’t bother the lad with, either – and for this nugget of knowledge we must thank what must be one of London’s most ‘niche’ interest groups, the Stretcher Railing Society (“For the promotion, protection and preservation of London’s ARP Stretcher Railings”).

A civil defence organisation set up in 1937, Air Raid Precautions (ARP) prepared for the worst. This was at a time when it was believed that the bomber would always get through. In consequence over 600,000 stretchers were manufactured, to cope with the vast number of casualties that were expected.

These weren’t very comfortable stretchers: just a tubular framework covered with a metal mesh. Their utilitarian nature was quite deliberate, though, as they would be easier to decontaminate after a gas attack.

After the war, some of those stretchers were upcycled into railings. At perhaps a dozen locations in London, new housing estates acquired railings with a distinctive ‘bulge’ at the ends of every panel: these had been the feet of the stretchers, and they’re a dead giveaway that you’re looking at no ordinary bit of fence, but a piece of our history. They’re every bit as much a sign of the war as the funny little stubs of cut-away iron that still adorn so many of our public spaces.

Upcycled stretcher-railings

Very early on in this blog, I felt the need to explain why recycling doesn’t really work. We can’t afford to think of an item that we’ve finished with as a collection of chemical elements, to be reduced to their simplest state before reuse. If we do that, we waste all the effort, ingenuity and – critically – the energy that went into shaping our stuff. Because recycling is so often downcycling (reuse of the material with degradation caused by contaminants) we make life a little bit harder each time we send our materials around the loop.

McDonough and Braungart (2002) made the case for upcycling, which might be understood to mean finding new uses for unwanted items such that they don’t become waste. A key point here is that the upcycled product should have a higher value than it had at the point it ceased to be wanted by the previous owner.

If you accept that definition then most of the examples of upcycling that you will find will beart projects. Picasso’s “Bull’s Head” was an early one, made from a couple of bits of an old bicycle. It’s fun, and some will say it’s art great art (personally, I’d say it’s no Guernica, but… whatever).

So, um… yeah. All we have to do with our waste is make it all into sculptures.

This kind of upcycling does nothing to solve the problems of our age. Paul Bonomini’s “WEEE Man” conveys a powerful message about how much e-waste we each generate, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions. In fact, a cynic might say it serves to keep three tonnes of material out of the recycling loop.

It might sound like a Glaswegian term of endearment, but the WEEE Man is actually a former exhibit at the Eden Project in Cornwall, showing the amount of waste electrical and electronic equipment an average Briton will throw away in their lifetime. (No word yet on what happens to sculptures at end-of-life…)

If we all get creative and upcycle all our waste into art, we could actually increase the demand for virgin material. How much art does a society need? Taken to the extreme, we’ll be drowning in art instead of drowning in waste. This is why the ARP stretcher railings have such an important lesson for us: they haven’t been turned into something that’s only for looking at, and unlike art installations we don’t only need one: the more you reuse, the better. Also, in their new life they’ve been in use for something like seventy years, far exceeding the useful life seen in their primary purpose.

Perhaps upcycling needs a broader interpretation of value, where it’s not about price, but utility – but if we do that, there’s really not very much upcycling going on at all.

‘Liter of light’ – the people using old lemonade bottles to make improvised light pipes – is still looking good, though.

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I recently went to the excellent RAF Museum at Cosford, with the particular aim of seeing one rare ’plane – but not in the conventional sense.

The aircraft in question was sequestered away inside a pair of “conservation tunnels”, being sprayed with a citric acid solution for reasons of preservation. Was my journey down to Shropshire a waste of time, then? No! Admittedly I don’t usually drive 130 miles so that I can fail to see some wreckage while it’s being drizzled with dilute lemon juice, but this was special.

My interest was in a virtual representation of the aircraft, and after an extensive search (caused by human error[1]) I found two of them hovering a few metres above the tarmac in the overflow carpark.

Found at last: the Dornier 17, in a car park. The scale is a bit off, apparently.

Quite a convincing takeoff… except that the propellors aren’t spinning.

Apparition Dornier 17 is a free iPhone app, described as “A virtual window into the past, using augmented reality and location based media to recreate aircraft and their stories for the world to see and experience.” Promotional hyperbole aside, what it means is that if you’re in the right location and you waft your telephone around, a ‘live’ 3D model of said Dornier 17 is superimposed upon the feed from your camera. Walk around the location and you get to see the model from various angles. The app was developed by the Middlesex University Design and Innovation Centre and sponsored by Wagaming.net – the people behind ‘World of Tanks’ and other computer games.

I wanted to see how well the technology worked, but the aircraft itself is an interesting one as well. The Dornier Do 17 was a light bomber, used mainly by the Nazis. More than two thousand were built but not a single one survives intact today.

And the one in the tent, marinated in citric acid? In September 2008, the wreckage of a Do 17 was located on the Goodwin Sands, six kilometres off the coast of Kent. It had been on the seabed since August 26th 1940 when the aircraft took part in a raid against RAF stations in southern England. It was damaged by defending fighters and forced to ditch in the sea.

Due to the threat posed by thieving scuba-souvenir hunters, the find was kept a secret until arrangements could be made to recover it. In 2013 it was raised from the seabed and delivered to the restoration centre at Cosford – where the aforementioned citric acid solution is being used to wash away the salts and barnacles that have encrusted the wreck.

The last of her kind… and somewhat the worse for wear after being shot up and then left in seawater for decades.

A very long period of conservation work may lie ahead, but in the meantime we can see the machine in virtual form… although not from the comfort of your armchair. You still have to get out and visit a location. I doubt this is because the RAF Museum is particularly desperate to drum up business: not least because admission is free. What’s more, you can see virtual Dorniers in dozens of other locations around the world…but you do have to get out and find them.

Some of the Apparition Dornier locations (image: Google Maps)

Is this the Pokémon Go of history? Fitbit for sedentary aviation enthusiasts? Well… kind of. I’m quite taken with this synthesis of technologies. It introduces an apparent limitation in that the virtual world doesn’t exist purely for our convenience and we have to get out and navigate physical space if we want to enjoy it, but that’s actually evidence of a very clever system. If you can look through a “virtual window” and see a Dornier 17 in the distance, you might be able to use the same technology to answer the perennial question of supply chains:

Imagine using your phone not to dial up a call centre and listen to muzak while you wait for the chance to gripe about the non-appearance of your latest purchase, but to actually see where it is in real time, your magic vision reaching beyond the horizon. To know that your package isn’t merely ‘out for delivery’ but that it’s no longer stuck in that eight-mile tailback on the M62, and is now speeding towards your location… wouldn’t that be something? Or how about arriving at your local ‘click and collect’ store and not having to wait while a member of staff sorts through a pile of boxes that looks like that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’? If, instead, you could peer through your own “virtual window” and see exactly which boxes are yours – and perhaps receive additional information such as a video on safe handling for heavy boxes.

Apparition Dornier shows a video about the conservation project, if you choose to look in the right direction: the two tents in the background aren’t open to the public, but the app gives me magic vision, allowing me to see inside.

My ancient iPhone 5 worked perfectly well for this, which suggests that all but about four percent of smartphone owners could have a “virtual window” of this kind, if they wanted. The model I saw was a bit clunky: up close the surface could be seen to be pixellated, and perhaps it could have been rendered to match the real lighting conditions, for additional realism… but this is a product of electronics and information technology, and it’s a few years old now: if my life has taught me anything, it’s that we can expect something a lot better to come along within a few years.

Having a close look at the landing gear. Could an augmented reality app one day help an engineer to perform maintenance tasks?

What else might we do with the technology? All kinds of things. A company could offer a permanent ‘virtual open day’ to anybody who stopped by the front gate, telling the community about all the good things they’re doing. A walking tour of the city walls of London could be made much more interesting if you could actually see them, instead of merely being told where they once stood. Perhaps an artist’s installation no longer needs no to be constrained by mundane limits such as planning permission, budget, or gravity: come and see the Colossus of Rotherham… and so on.

The window on the past is surprisingly futuristic, then. In fact, I think the world just acquired an extra dimension.

[1] You need to allow the Apparition app to have certain permissions on your phone, including access to your current location, or your “virtual window” won’t show you anything.

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If you think that ‘SPSS’ refers to the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences software tool, as used by so many of my students, think again. Today we’re in the domain of law enforcement, looking at Self-Propelled Semi-Submersibles.

Back in the 1980s, the preferred method for getting cocaine from Colombia to Mexico was to make a dash in a “cigarette boat” – a small, fast vessel that might otherwise be used for offshore powerboat racing. Similarly, during the era of prohibition, “rum runners” had used speed to evade the US Coast Guard.

That’s the way things were done, back when we were all watching ‘Miami Vice’ on TV, but running drugs by sea became a much more difficult proposition when radar coverage was improved and the Coast Guard were equipped with better boats of their own. (How unsporting!)

The drug smuggling business is a simple matter of economics: the cost of a kilo of cocaine when it leaves a jungle lab in South America is around $1,500 but it will have a street value of $50,000 or more when it reaches a major US city. Profits like that mean there is no shortage of people who are prepared to try their luck in the smuggling business, and they also allow a lot of scope for investment in the supply chain: hired muscle, firearms, bribes for officials… and narco-submarines.

Rumours that submarines were being constructed for the purposes of drug-running had been heard throughout the 1990s, but it was a long time before one was actually seen. Meanwhile, they acquired the nickname Bigfoot, after the legendary forest-dwelling cryptid: everybody’s heard of the beast, but few can claim to have seen one.

In November 1988 a submersible ‘capsule’ 6.4m in length was found off Boca Raton, Florida. It had been designed to be towed behind a boat, and could be submerged by remote control. When discovered it was empty: whatever it had contained had already been smuggled into the USA.

For a while, this was the only hard evidence to support the submersible drug-smuggling hypothesis. Then in 2000 a half-finished submarine was found in a warehouse in the suburbs of Bogotá, the Colombian capital. Documents in Russian were recovered from the site, suggesting a Russian mafia connection, or perhaps that Russian technicians had been involved in the construction project. This wasn’t the first such connection: in 1995 an émigré from the former Soviet Union had been arrested in Miami while trying to broker a deal between the Russian mafia and the Colombian cartels, concerning the sale of an old Soviet submarine.

Inside the half-built submarine that was found in a warehouse in Bogotá. If completed it would have been able to transport over 180 tonnes of drugs, submerging to evade law enforcement.

News of the Bogotá find flashed around the world: Bigfoot had been found.

It wasn’t until 2006 that the US Coast Guard caught a Bigfoot at sea. A cutter encountered a strange vessel 145km southwest of Costa Rica. It was around fifteen metres in length, and featured three snorkels. On board they found four men, an AK-47… and 2.7 tonnes of cocaine.

The first Bigfoot, seized in November 2006, is now on display at the Joint Interagency Task Force South. [Photo: Department of Defense / Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro]

This wasn’t a true submarine, but a semi-submersible: a simpler and more affordable craft that can reduce its buoyancy until there’s almost nothing visible above the waterline. Others, often lumped in with semi-submersibles are in fact low-profile vessels, but their purpose is the same and either type can be put together in the jungle without requiring the kind of materials or skills that will attract attention. (Building a true submarine in Bogotá had proved to be rather conspicuous, not least because the city is 2,640 metres above sea level, which wouldn’t have made for an easy launch!) Semi-submersibles are typically made from fibreglass and wood, so if you can build a motorboat you probably have the skills and tools necessary to make a simple smuggling craft of this kind. Dozens of the things are being built every year.

This image of a narco-sub being seized shows just how absurdly small their profile can be.

For all their homespun simplicity, semi-submersibles are a very potent threat. The materials from which they’re constructed make them hard to spot on radar, and additional sneakiness is achieved by painting them the same colour as the sea and having them ride so low in the water that there’s almost nothing to reveal their presence. Exhaust gases from the engines are sometimes routed through long pipes that run under the boat, such that seawater provides a cooling function: such vessels aren’t going to show up on infrared.

Most narco-subs are very basic, but the War on Drugs has forced the pace of technological advancement, as the interior of the vessel on the right shows. [photos: Luca Zanetti]

There are other tricks, too, such as towed ‘torpedo’ cargo pods that can be cut loose if the smugglers are about to be boarded. The pod sinks, spends a day or two submerged and then surfaces again, using a radio beacon to advertise its position so that the smugglers can recover it. True (fully submersible) submarines appear to be of interest again, and there’s talk of GPS-enabled drone craft as well, although the cartels seem reluctant to entrust millions of dollars’ worth of drugs to automata just yet: perhaps because you can’t threaten a robot with reprisals against its family if it fails to deliver the goods.

A key weapon in the good guys’ arsenal is the Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act, brought into US law in September 2008. This was the legislation that specifically named the Self-Propelled Semi-Submersible, and made it illegal to operate an unregistered one in international waters. Before that, any smuggler who got caught could simply scuttle their boat to turn a drugs bust into a ‘rescue operation’ from which no prosecution was possible as the evidence was lost. Nowadays, if you’re caught on board a Bigfoot, you go to jail for a very long time.

Some narco-subs are surprisingly sophisticated, such as this fully submersible example, seized in 2011.

Drug smuggling submarines have an interesting ancestor in the merchant submarine. In the First World War the Germans built two of these for the purpose of conducting trade with the USA – something that had become all but impossible due to an allied naval blockade. Deutschland and Bremen were developed and constructed using private funds, and launched in 1916. Deutschland made a highly successful trip to the USA, arriving in July 1916 with something like 680 tonnes of cargo on board. Chemical dyes, medicines, gemstones and mail were delivered, and then the submarine returned to Bremerhaven with a cargo of nickel, tin and rubber – vital war materials. As would be seen with Bigfoot ninety years later, the profit from a single voyage more than justified the cost of construction. Bremen set out for the USA on a similar trading mission in August 1916, and was never seen again. One theory is that she hit a mine, while another suggests a collision. Nobody knows.

Strangely proportioned for a submarine, this photo sees Deutschland in New London, Connecticut

Deutschland made a second successful trip in November 1916, and would have been sent out again but relations with the USA had soured and trade became impossible. In April 1917 the Americans entered the war on the allied side, bringing an end to the usefulness of the merchant submarine. Deutschland and others of the same type still under construction were converted to long-range ‘submarine cruisers’ and sent out to fight – with considerable success.

New merchant submarine applications have been proposed from time to time, although none has left the drawing board. In the USA, General Dynamics explored the possibility of submarine tankers for oil and liquefied natural gas, opening up arctic oilfields to wider exploitation. The Soviet Union also had plans to build submarine tankers and even a 912 TEU container boat, configured for trading routes beneath the polar ice cap… but the Soviet Union collapsed instead, leaving futuristic submarine cargo vessels as something that you’re only going to see on Thunderbirds for a while yet.

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The watchword for UK educators, nowadays, is employability. We need to ensure that our students have better prospects as a result of the time they spent with us (not least because of debts that they commonly acquire during their studies) but how do you prepare a student for a career as a supply chain professional?

The Very Enterprising Community Interest Company think they have the answer – along with a pretty silly name, obviously – and their solution is an educational board game, Business on the Move.

Will we end up calling it BOTM, for short? Not on this blog… but school kids everywhere probably just started sniggering.

Every once in a while there’s an article (e.g., this one) in which those in the know fret that children didn’t know where their food came from. Inner city kids are horrified that eggs come out of a chicken’s backside, that vegetables grow in mud and so on. Trouble is, it’s not just food: young people are hazy on where manufactured goods come from, too – and how they are made to arrive. That’s where Business on the Move comes in: the game’s creators (Andy Page and Patricia Smedley) have used it with children as young as nine, which is pretty clever when you consider the complexity of the real-life systems that it represents.

Planes, trains and automobiles. Oh – and ships.

This is a big game, in a big box that’s bursting with supply chainy goodness! Literally, in the case of my copy, which was damaged in transit. Plumbers have leaky taps; supply chain professionals have bad logistics. In fact, the whole game is an embodiment of the global supply chain that it describes: a sticker on the edge of my box reports that it was made in Ningbo, China (a quick shout out to old friends at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo…) so the game was imported in just the same way that the little counters on the board make their way from China to the UK.

My copy of Business on the Move arrived somewhat scrambled, but the game box was the only casualty. With a somewhat squishy box measuring 61cm by 44cm, this isn’t a game that I’m going to be taking with me to Botswana on teaching trips.

In Business on the Move, virtually everything comes from China. There is a single domestic manufacturer, “the UK Factory” on the board but it comes into play only rarely, on the turn of a card. That’s a little unfair because UK manufacturing has grown tremendously in productivity: the “decline” of British manufacturing has really only been one of employment – not output.

At this point, let’s have a look at what you get for £60, plus shipping. The first thing we have to do is pause for a giggle at the world map that completely omits the Americas. (Are the authors getting the Americans back for the map in Avalon Hill’s ‘Diplomacy’ – the one that famously refers to the whole of the British Isles as ‘England’?) Beneath the game board, we find a large collection of counters that players of all ages will be itching to play with, featuring containers that fit into trucks and trains – although, sadly, not aboard ships and aircraft.

It’s like Christopher Columbus never sailed west: Business on the Move omits the Americas.

You get a lot of bits and pieces in Business on the Move: probably more that you’ll ever need, which is useful for a classroom setting where a few bits can be lost over time.

In game mechanics, Business on the Move is reminiscent of an old fantasy quest board game called Talisman, in that it features a board with looped, concentric playing areas where the player can choose to move either clockwise or anticlockwise after the dice are thrown. It’s a simple but workable system. In this game the player must declare at the start of their turn that it will be an ‘air and sea turn’, or a ‘road and rail turn’. The fairly simplistic air and sea stage involves bringing containers of goods from China to the UK: aircraft take a direct route and are likely to arrive sooner, but each only delivers a single container’s worth of goods. When a ship arrives in the UK, it delivers three containers of goods.

(Yes, the idea that a container ship carries only three times as much as an aircraft is ludicrous, but it’s a game. You’ll need to tell yourself that from time to time as you buy cargo ships for £20,000 and aeroplanes for £30,000, but it’s really no worse than buying Whitehall for £140 in Monopoly, and building a house on it for a hundred quid…)

Having purchased any new vehicles and paid for their upkeep (more on this later…) you’re almost ready to “roll your dice and move your mice”, as board game enthusiasts say. First, you must take a card, and again these are split into ‘air and sea’ or ‘road and rail’. These introduce a random element, detailing events such gridlock on the roads, piracy on the high seas, or the opportunity to buy an extra vehicle at a reduced price. At last it’s time to roll the dice: the number thrown matches the number of vehicles that are eligible to move, up to a maximum of four. All are thrown at once, and the player chooses how to allocate the results between those vehicles.

These aren’t standard dice, however. Instead of generating a number from 1–6, these only go up to five, with an additional result of ‘CO2’ – which is somewhat like rolling a zero. The player is then given the option of paying £5,000 to purchase carbon credits, permitting a result of ‘CO2’ to be re-rolled. It’s a simplistic system – all goods movements are assumed to have the same carbon footprint – but it’s good to see that the contribution logistics makes to climate change isn’t introduced in some game variant or optional rule: it’s built right into the fundamentals of the game.

When a ‘CO2’ result is rolled, the player can pay into a carbon credits system for another chance to move. Later, a player may be able to collect the accumulated carbon credits money.

Players will always begin with an air and sea turn, because all goods start in China. Will you choose to buy pricey aeroplanes with their limited cargo capacity, or will you choose the slower but more capacious ships? Will you buy some of each, reasoning that if certain random events mean that one kind of vehicle is delayed or sent back to base, the other one still has a chance of getting through? This is an example of the strategic decisions that players face as they play through the game. Some such dilemmas aren’t always terribly realistic: after all, most real companies don’t find it necessary to own a vehicle of any sort in order to get a container to the UK: they leave that job to a third party – and pay a bit less than you end up paying in the game, when you take all the risks yourself.

Logistics was never so multimodal as it is in Business on the Move: the Green player is supposedly Eddie Stobart… but this is a parallel universe incarnation of Eddie Stobbart where the company is also a shipping line and/or an airline. It would make more sense if players were able to negotiate deals to carry each other’s cargo, or to have a non-player entity take on some elements of the overall logistic system, but… it’s a game. By forcing players to move goods at both the intercontinental and national level, a more educational experience results.

With the goods now sitting at ‘Container Handling’ it’s time to get them on their way to the recipient. A player’s obligations to deliver are shown on cards with the CILT logo: for example, £30,000 will be received for delivering a container of microwaves to Tesco Extra, or £12,000 for delivering cuddly toys to Home Bargains. This is a nice touch because the anonymous container token can become something recognisable, that players feel a connection with. They get a sense of achievement in addition to some money.

Will the player choose to buy a train, or a fleet of trucks? Vehicle pricing continues to be artificial, with a train costing £40,000… and again, who actually buys trains? You’d pick up the ’phone and call Freightliner to get your goods moved, surely?

Rail transport is going to end up with a bad reputation because trains are relatively expensive, and a train only moves twice as much cargo as a truck. They move around the board slightly faster (fewer spaces on the inside track) but this advantage is dissipated by the need to move goods onwards from the railhead with a truck: trains seem like a bit of a bad bargain. Upon each turn, either ‘air and sea’ or ‘road and rail’, players have to pay for the upkeep of all relevant vehicles at £2,000 per vehicle – which includes those that you no longer have a use for. Since goods going overland must complete their journey by road, trains are going to be dead weight at least some of the time, and there’s no mechanism within the rules for selling off an asset that isn’t working well.

The game can be played at varying levels of detail because the rules are split into seven distinct levels: you can get players started quickly and then introduce more realism later. At the most basic level a ship that arrives at ‘UK air and sea terminals’ is immediately converted into three containers, and the vessel is sent to the company base, ready to be reused. There is no requirement to sail back to China… but since the basic game is a race to deliver four containers of goods, there isn’t much more sailing to be done anyway. Some of the simplistic game mechanics are addressed as the level of complexity is ramped up in subsequent games. For example the Monopoly-style business of handling money in the form of high-value banknotes is done away with in later games, in favour of company accounts: this will be great for our module on finance and decision making. At another level comes the opportunity to take “pallet orders” instead of container lots: containers are split into three pallet loads at distribution centres and then sent on for final delivery. With this comes the option of buying into a pallet pooling scheme… or not. Real-life decisions reflected in a board game: excellent!

Some other simplifications remain throughout the game’s seven levels, though. Insurance could have been made interesting, but instead it’s a mere vestigial stub of what it might have been. Buying insurance costs £5,000 regardless of how many vehicles you have and what cargo they might be carrying. Insurance is not per-period but lasts indefinitely, until a claim is made: you hand over the card when you invoke the insurance to avoid certain mishaps. Having handed over the insurance voucher, you’re in the clear. Given that a vehicle costs at least £20,000, the uninsured player would be daft not to renew their insurance at the start of the very next turn. The message that you’d be wise to take out insurance is valid but in a system as simplistic as this, it’s reduced to a no-brainer. (We’ve been teaching a lot more about risk and the value insurance, just using Monopoly.)

A simplification that I really find it hard to like is that any container can satisfy any one order – there’s no such thing as traceability. If you lose two containers off your ship in a storm, for example, it’s a very non-specific setback. You haven’t lost the consignment of lipgloss, push chairs, laundry detergent, or whatever: you can move any one of your remaining containers to any destination represented on one of your orders cards and collect some money. Thus, on a bad roll of the dice you might still manage to make a short move and declare that the goods have arrived at Home Bargains – or on a good die roll you could forge on up the board towards Marks & Spencer and a more valuable payoff – with the same container. Real life doesn’t work like this. Or have we invented Shroedinger’s shipping container, where the contents are undetermined until it is opened? Fascinating.

I lost some containers, swept off one of my ships in a storm – or would have, but the “i” symbol denotes an event where my insurance can be invoked.

Actually, we need to talk about Marks & Spencer. Clearly, they sponsored the development of the game – just as a lot of organisations did: the game positively drips with logos. That was a good way to fund the game’s development, I suppose, but why were Marks ’n’ Sparks allowed to feature on the board in three places? The distinction between ‘Your M&S’ on the north side of the board and ‘Your M&S Online – Mobile’ on the west side is insufficient – in fact just plain confusing. It could lead to frustrating mistakes, or even accusations of cheating. Perhaps M&S have convinced themselves that they really do have three distinct, strong and popular brands… but it doesn’t work for the purposes of a board game. Fortunately, such a problem is easily remedied with some laser printed stickers: simply replace the indistinct or unfamiliar logos on the board and on the order cards with those of a different organisation. I thought it would be nice to have IKEA in the game: everybody likes IKEA. A lot of the entities represented in the game don’t really have a recognisable brand in the eyes of the common man. If you’re already a supply chain professional you might know who Bisham Consulting are, but for most players the game would be far better if the container of goods went to a well known recipient like Toys ‘R’ Us or B&Q – neither of whom are represented. (You might object that I’m covering up the logos of the sponsors that made Business on the Move possible, in favour of companies that didn’t, but so what? They sponsored the Very Enterprising Community Interest Company – not me and my teaching.)

Weak differentiation between objectives could cause players some frustration.

Before we leave the subject of Marks & Spencer (having replaced two thirds of their territory on the game board with something more distinctive) one thing that needs to be discussed is the notion of importing foodstuffs from China. With the apparently endless succession of food scares and scandals coming out of China, food from that source is thankfully rare in the UK. The Food Storage & Distribution Federation are mentioned on a few cards, but these can be picked out and disposed of easily enough. One of them is a bit silly anyway, in that it implies that all containers in the game are temperature controlled.

None of these gripes should be seen as insurmountable problems with Business of the Move: unless you’re competing in the world championships[1], you should always feel free to fix anything that you don’t like in a board game. Out of the box, Talisman (mentioned earlier) is a pretty awful game – but if you throw out certain cards that wreck the game mechanics and make a few other tweaks, it can be improved no end. Few people play Monopoly according to the rules as written. Similarly, Business on the Move is a very promising kit of bits: it has a few quirks, but nothing that can’t be fixed with ease.

Surprisingly, I have been unable to find a web-based forum that allows owners of the game to share experiences, and perhaps resolve the occasional ambiguities that are found within the rules. Perhaps the Very Enterprising Community Interest Company don’t have the resources to moderate a forum, but it seems a major oversight in these days of Web 2.0. (If you can find an online community that discusses how to get the best out of the game, please let me know?)

Meanwhile, I think one of the best ways to resolve the limitations of the game will be to have the students take care of them. For example, after introducing the students to the game, why not turn them loose with instructions to write rules for a game variant of their choice?

One thing a modified game might benefit from is rules for vans. If you’re playing the variant where you get to split a container into three pallet-loads for different recipients, it’s a shame that you’re left delivering those pallet loads using the standard truck: a fleet of vans could be made to dash off in all directions. Other student projects might add a set of rules that address warehousing, or replace the simplistic rules for insurance with something that teaches more about risk and decision management. How about adding a ‘nearshoring’ option whereby the player gets to consider procuring goods from the European Union – less profitable but with items available sooner? You could have UK manufacturing play more of a role, too.

Business on the Move needs a few tweaks to really get the best from it, but it’s oozing with possibilities.

[1] If ‘World Championships’ and ‘board game’ seems too embarrassingly nerdy, bear in mind that the Monopoly World Championship is played with real money – winner take all.

Like this:

Some time ago, I was stuck in a meeting. Not exactly The Meeting From Hell but definitely somewhere on the outskirts, like maybe Erebus, or Tartarus. Naturally enough, I decided to use the time more meaningfully, and began doodling.

Procurement, operations, distribution: those are the three elements of a supply chain strategy, according to what we tell our students.

I drew them vertically, for a change. I’m trying to get away from showing supply chains as going from left to right, but it’s a difficult habit to break: I spent years simulating supply chains, and the software packages we used were all designed to show products as flowing from left to right – a paradigm that doesn’t do us much good, really. Workpieces flowing from top to bottom fit the language of the supply chain much better: “upstream” and “downstream”, vertical integration and so on.

Following the “big three” I added an after-sales service component. Many modern supply chains include this, and thus far we’re not looking at anything that doesn’t appear in Porter’s Value Chain… if stood on its pointy tip. (Again, getting away from the left-to-right paradigm.)

So we’ve got a natural flow: gravity-assisted through procurement, operations, distribution and after-sales service. Next, I left a gap, which I called “uncontrolled life”. This represents the part of the life of a product where it has passed beyond any formal support, but remains useful to somebody. Like a car that has passed to its second or third owner, who decides that the declining value of the vehicle means it no longer deserves the premium demanded by the dealership: an independent garage works out cheaper on a per-hour basis and may provide access to ‘clone’ or salvaged parts.

Sooner or later, though, a product becomes too broken or too obsolete to be of use. It reaches the end of its life… but the supply chain may feature an ‘end of life’ phase where components or materials are salvaged. This is a growth area – not least because of legislation that establishes extended producer responsibility.

That first diagram offers a summary of the present-day position, perhaps, but it wasn’t always this way. For example, after-sales service is a relatively new concept that could only really take off once standardisation made it possible to sell spare parts.

I started wondering about how things have changed over the years (yes, the meeting I was in offered ample time for such reflections…) and by the time I’d thought it through I had a set of distinct ages illustrated, in a not-very-scientific analysis of the relativeimportance of the different components of the supply chain. You can see a neat version of my next doodle here:

Supply Chain Trends. Maybe.

Before humans, there was procurement and use – the way a chimp might find and keep a stone, so as to crack nuts. In a few cases, there may have been simple operations too, such as stripping the leaves and bark off a twig before it’s used to fish termites out of their mound.

Termites – it’s what’s for dinner. [Photo: BBC / Emma Napper]

In prehistory (defined as human activity after the invention of stone tools, but before the development of writing) we added distribution: the idea that you might share something with somebody else. Also, the range of operations that might be performed is expanded by human ingenuity: we were shaping tools, making mud bricks, curing hides and so on. At this point, ’end of life’ doesn’t feature at all; you just leave waste and worn out items wherever they happen to fall. Moving on into ancient history, this changes. For the first time, some forms of waste have value. If a broken item is made from copper or bronze it can be melted down and made into something else: recycling has arrived. Distribution also increases in importance in this era, for example Bronze Age Cyprus shipping copper to the Near East and Egypt, and returning with commodities such as papyrus and wool.

Technologies change, and empires rise and fall, but the relative importance of procurement, operations and so on doesn’t appear to change until the industrial revolution, when operations become particularly significant. For the first time, having an innovative means of production is more important than having access to the raw materials. (These are accessed more readily as a result of advancements in trade and navigation.)

I decided that mass production deserved to be considered as an era in its own right, beginning about a century ago. Again, we see a growth in the relative importance of operations – plus the arrival of the service component, which begins a squeeze on the uncontrolled life element.

In the information age – our own era – operations has declined in importance, because there’s more outsourcing (procurement increases in importance) and production increasingly involves alliances. Similarly, responsibility for the distribution function is shared with third-party logistics (3PL) partners. Growth in services is observed as companies look to establish a continuing revenue stream, and there is an increased focus on the end-of-life, the two combining to further limit the uncontrolled life element.

And what does the future hold? I think it’s reasonable to assume that end-of-life issues will continue to increase in importance. Outsourcing will grow; alliances and partnerships of all kinds, too – and the uncontrolled life of products will be further squeezed via business models based on leasing rather than outright ownership.

I’m not saying I have this 100% right, and the situation pertaining in a specific industry may be different… but it’s interesting to see how things have changed, isn’t it?

Like this:

In Greenwich, London, the Cutty Sark is a popular tourist attraction. A British merchant ship, she’s a rare survivor from a vanished, glamorous age of commerce by sail.

Exceptionally sleek and skilfully constructed, it’s a shame to have to report that this beautiful ship was just about obsolete from the outset: she was launched in November 1869… the same month that the Suez Canal was completed, changing the geography of global trade forever.

As a clipper, Cutty Sark was designed for the tea trade, then a highly competitive annual race (with cargo) from China to London. The journey involved sailing around the southern tip of Africa and steering a route that would make the most of the prevailing winds. Cutty Sark employed composite construction (wooden planking over an iron frame, all sheathed in Muntz metal) to produce an elegant, streamlined hull that made her one of the fastest ships of her time. It’s worth noting that she isn’t just a vehicle that used to be a part of the global supply network, but also a product of it: British wrought iron frames and metal sheeting, American rock elm, East India teak… all assembled on the Clyde.

Fast sailing over long distances (up to 363 nautical miles or 672 km in a day) was no longer confined to clippers, sadly. The SS Agamemnon had already been in use for three years, demonstrating the advantages of a high-pressure boiler and a compound steam engine – and when the Suez Canal opened it offered a 6,100 km shortcut that was largely unsuited to sailing vessels. The days of the tea clipper were numbered.

Long before the standard intermodal freight container, there were tea chests. A team of Chinese stevedores could load a ship with up to 10,000 of them in 2–3 days, and on her first return voyage, Cutty Sark brought 1,305,812 pounds (592 tonnes) of tea from Shanghai. Since there was no way to return them once empty, tea chests found all kinds of secondary uses in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, becoming storage boxes, furniture and even musical instruments.

Eight times Cutty Sark sailed in the tea season, one of a dwindling number of tea clippers. In December 1877 nobody in Shanghai was prepared to entrust their cargo of tea to a mere sailing ship (insurance premiums for steamships were a lot lower) and this marked the end of sail in the tea trade. Cutty Sark and the other clippers had to change with the times: they were modified to carry a simpler, smaller arrangement of sails that reduced crewing requirements and maintenance costs, and they carried new cargoes on new routes.

Reducing manning levels in an effort to cut costs… a reaction to hard times that shipping lines still employ today. Another tactic that we see employed almost universally today is slow steaming: reducing speed in order to save fuel. It’s a good response to industry overcapacity and the high price of fuel because reducing speed by about a third can save thousands of tonnes of fuel oil… but it’s amusing to note that this has reduced modern commerce to a speed that Cutty Sark could have bettered on a good day – without spending a penny on fuel, and without producing any emissions!

When the tea trade changed to exclude clippers, Cutty Sark began to carry wool from Australia. In the 1883–1884 season, she made a journey from Australia to London in 83 days, 25 days ahead of any other vessel. In 1885 Captain Richard Woodget managed to get the time down to 73 days. Cutty Sark dominated the wool trade for a decade… until the steamships moved in on that commodity as well. In 1895 she was sold to the Portuguese firm Joaquim Antunes Ferreira, and renamed Ferreira as a result. She traded general cargoes here and there, and by 1922 she was the last clipper still operating. A spell as a cadet training ship followed, and when she was no longer needed in that role she was installed in a purpose-built dry dock in Greenwich, becoming a museum ship in the 1950s.

After decades of sitting on her keel – an unnatural position that caused a certain amount of sagging – came an extensive conservation project, beginning in 2006. It was a textbook case of poor project management, featuring cost over-runs, poor record-keeping and questionable security arrangements… punctuated by a terrible fire in May 2007 that might have destroyed the whole ship.

Cutty Sark is part of the National Historic Fleet, making her equivalent to a Grade 1 Listed Building: destruction by fire is not an option. Fortunately, much of the fabric of the ship had already been taken away for conservation [photo: ITV.com]

In April 2012, Cutty Sark reopened after years of hard work. The most noticeable change is to the dry dock. In my childhood it was a simple pit where wind-blown crisp packets would tend to gather, but now it’s a glazed space, the roof appearing to be an ocean swell that the ship is riding. In the new scheme, Cutty Sark ‘sails’ some three metres above, allowing visitors a good look at her most important feature: that beautiful, streamlined hull.

Visitors can now walk beneath Cutty Sark’s hull, clad in a gleaming copper/zinc alloy that’s a close match to the original Muntz metal.

The end result of Cutty Sark’s renovation is controversial. The Victorian Society described it as a misguided attempt to fit the corporate hospitality market, and Building Design magazine named it the worst new building in 2012. (The ‘anti’ camp were hoping for a restoration that would have left Cutty Sark seaworthy.)Yachting World were more appreciative, though, describing the end result as sensational.

Cutty Sark will never again be able to return to the sea, but she still formed a focus for the ceremonies that preceded the Tall Ships race of 2017. At the Sailors’ Ball on Good Friday, dancers were dressed in their best vintage sailor chic, and after champagne and fireworks on deck, I enjoyed the opportunity to explore Cutty Sark without crowds, before we went below to dance. As the band played ‘Somewhere Beyond the Sea’, I felt as if I’d become one of the denizens of Rapture, the doomed city beneath the waves in the BioShock games: even so, count me among the people who approve of the Cutty Sark in her new role. For a ship that never quite worked out as planned, she has a surprising amount to teach us.

Like this:

In addition to supply chains and sustainable manufacturing, I’m quite interested in art. That’s why I came to be looking at a list of lost artworks: pieces that are known to have been destroyed or have otherwise gone missing over the years.

There is a long, long list of art that we can no longer see. The final portion of the Bayeux Tapestry, for example, or Leonardo’s Leda and the Swan. Even that tent thing that Tracey Emin created (I’m really not too bothered about the loss of that one…) Among the many items that have been burnt, blown up, stolen or simply mislaid, one piece leapt off the page at me.

Stolen artwork

The piece in question was Two Forms (Divided Circle) – a bronze sculpture made by Dame Barbara Hepworth in 1969. The list of lost artworks said that it had been on display in Dulwich Park, London, and had been stolen in December 2011… yet I knew without a doubt that I’d seen it in the grounds of the University of Bolton.

Two Forms (Divided Circle) at the University of Bolton

OMFG, I might have thought (but for the fact that my internal monologue doesn’t employ acronyms), I know where that one is!

OMFG… as they say.

I was right… and I was wrong. I had indeed recognised the Barbara Hepworth piece, but it wasn’t the stolen one. Seven copies of Two Forms had been cast: the one I’d seen in front of the University of Bolton was number four, and the stolen one was number five.

Sad remains of the stolen sculpture in London [photo: Press Association]

So: that was just one of the days on which I didn’t solve any major art thefts. But consider this: the metal thieves will have shared maybe £750 for the bronze that they stole, by weight – while the sculpture was insured for £500,000. Well, you know what they say:

“If you think education is expensive – try ignorance.”

Those words have been attributed to a lot of different people. Perhaps that just goes to show that it’s a popular adage, and widely held to be true. Trouble is, education has become rather expensive, nowadays. When I went to university, we still got a maintenance grant, courtesy of the Education Act 1962. (By 1990, a frozen and fairly miserly amount that saw us dressing in army surplus, and getting jobs every summer… but receiving even a small grant was better than taking out a loan.) When the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 repealed the earlier Act, grants were axed and tuition fees were introduced – perhaps surprisingly, under a Labour government.

Tuition fees are now £9,000 per year. Borrowing even a little bit of money for living expenses, it’s easy to see why a present-day student can expect to be £50,000 in debt by the time they graduate. At a time of life when they might want to get married, buy a house, start a family…

There is an alternative. Degree apprenticeships are a relatively new educational route, combining a university education with employment in a chosen profession. Work experience; a degree; employment upon graduation; no tuition fees; no debt. What’s not to like?

I had my first exposure to the degree apprenticeship system a year ago, when I gave a guest lecture at the University of Cumbria. The students were all apprentices from Sellafield Ltd., a nuclear decommissioning company. The nuclear industry was one of the first to benefit from a degree apprenticeship standard, and I was very impressed by the young people I met that day.

Again, what’s not to like? Employers get to advertise a highly desirable job, attract hundreds of candidates and choose from among the brightest and best, secure in the knowledge that the new employees are likely to stay the distance in order to complete their part-time studies – while being trained in subjects chosen by the employer, delivered at little or no real cost.

The funding mechanism is clever, and it needed to be because the UK had an appallingly high tax burden already (unless you’re Starbucks, Amazon, or Apple, obviously…) Employers in England that have a pay bill in excess of £3 million per year will pay the apprenticeship levy from now on. This is charged at an additional 0.5% on salaries – a deductible expense for Corporation Tax purposes.

Registered companies can then spend their apprenticeship levy on training, developing home-grown talent for the future needs of the business. Imagine that!

Last week, I made another visit to the University of Cumbria, and met the second batch of students on the programme. It was March 29th: the day that the UK triggered Article 50, starting a two-year countdown on our exit from the European Union. Perhaps, in the new political landscape, companies of all kinds are going to need to focus on developing home-grown talent, instead of simply assuming that people with the skills we need can be bought in.

To make the most of the opportunities that higher apprenticeships present, companies need a suitable Trailblazer: a proposal from a group of employers that defines the degree apprenticeship standard for their sector, identifying the skills, knowledge and behaviours that are sought. I’m pleased to say that I’m involved in one such project, developing an apprenticeship standard for the Supply Chain Professional: if we’re successful, employers in England will be able to spend their levy on training that’s specifically tailored to their own needs.

I think this is the most exciting, most useful thing to happen to higher education in a very long time, and it may be that you want to join the revolution, too. Have a look at supplychain.org.uk for more information.

If this doesn’t work out, and students still need to fund their supply chain studies, Plan B involves a practical “logistics exercise”… and a building where I know for a fact that they’ve left half a million quid’s worth of art at the front.